Cirrus@Austlit

While never residents per se, as long-term repeat visitors and thus 'fans' of Darwin in all its complex diversity it was a pleasure to once again be evocatively trans-ported there, if not literally then vicariously. Tess Lea's Darwin is a wonderful, if unusual book: equal parts local history and scholarly critique, exposé and confessional. On its back cover, the book is categorised as `travel/memoir'. It is those things, but also much more. There are tender touches and moments of quiet reflection, where one can almost feel the sand of Casuarina Beach under one's feet. And there are moments of sheer horror: Aboriginal massacres; children caught in violent cyclones, their bodies tom apart by flying bits of corrugated iron; gang rapes perpetrated on local teenagers by American soldiers. They are all a part of the story of this incredible, challenging locale. Darwin is really an (auto)biography: of a city, its people, its insects and its weather, and of a person with deep feelings and ambivalences for the place. The book has all the contradictions, fraught memories, traumas and emotions that come with the genre of autobiographical account, and that encapsulate Darwin, the city. (Introduction)

'As an immensely readable, well-researched and passionately engaged account of Darwin, Tess Lea's biography of a city might be expected to invite speculation about the challenges of neo-tropical urbanism. Her fine decision to present Darwin's history, people, cultures and environments through a suite of loosely grouped stories demonstrates the proposition that 'Darwin' does not exist as an urban centre with critical or historical mass to generate its own story. It is a con-centration or distribution of suburbs defined by two major edges: the coast and the military landing strip (qua airport). In planning terms, it is a constellation of residential grids and star forms whose essential gravitational pull is expansionist. The recent plan to build a new satellite town up the harbour, irrational on any ordinary principles of town planning, attested to the fact that Darwin remains a pattern of landing strips, sites of temporary arrival and sojourn, always considered preliminary to further flight. The Weddell debacle was not a mysterious offspring of an anti-social spirit of place: as the creation of separated residential developments south of Heavitree Gap in Alice Springs demonstrates, it embodies an institutional incapacity to manage the growth of complexity. Lacking control, the Northern Territory government relishes control: simplification has the double effect of calculability and discouragement.' (Introduction)

'Darwin is the final book in the popular NewSouth cities series; previous authors have tended to be creative writers, which for the most part really suits the series' style. While Tess Lea writes with deep personal local knowledge and an enthusiastic fervour and creativity, the book might have enjoyed novelists' flair and insight. Other books in the series are, as intended, true literary non-fiction. Paul Daley's Canberra illustrates the National Capital's utter constructed otherness, its importance and its paradoxical disconnections from the pots. Matthew Condon's offering on Brisbane depicts a metropolis that palpably transforms on the page, shifting from country town to big city with all the pretensions of sophistication and modernity. The production standards for these books are extremely high and quite rightly they have been lauded and applauded for the richness, diversity and simple yam spinning. These are quintessentially Australian books geographically fixed but nationally transformative. Seen together in its entirety this is the series that I would recommend to travellers, and others curious about the land down under and her odd two legged creatures.' (Introduction)

'Tess Lea's Darwin unfolds as at once autobiography, history, and ethnography, nimbly traversing a series of difficult questions that must face such an ambitious project. How might one account for an abiding Indigenous presence, both historically and as a contemporary force in the Top End, while remaining attuned to other agencies, human and non-human, and their contribution to the shape this city takes? How might that story provide a critical counter-narrative to durable tropes of heroic settlement, colonial nostalgia, romantic primitivism and pastoral largesse? How might one celebrate Darwin's human diversity, its biological diversity, and its beauty and sensory particularity, without papering over the violence, at times wilful ignorance, and racialising force of recent history? And finally, last but I imagine far from least, how do you craft that story for a non-academic audience, opening the topic to critical reflection and taking seriously lessons learned in scholarship, ethnography and conversation? Darwin provides a sharp, riveting, and generative response to these and other questions in a narrative that speaks with audiences and interlocutors who will bring their own expectations and demands to reading. The book succeeds in this, in part, by mobilising and thinking through the senses, through sound, smell, and the lively, vulnerable surface of the skin. It also succeeds, I would argue, because of the manifest care and respect that Lea brings to her topic.'(Introduction)

'To review books, as those of us who press this task upon our colleagues well know, is to enact academic generosity, part of the voluntary reciprocity that still sustains universities in these increasingly hard and pressured times. Even if a write-up is unsympathetic, contents still have to be read, and there is little official reward for the gifting of time, wit and wording energy required for crafting a response. To have my recent book on Darwin taken up by the five people of the calibre enlisted here is thus more than humbling: something rare, motivating and invaluable has been honoured in the assembling. That they express things in a way I wish I had — oh, for the chance to plagiarise and rewrite the original! ' (Introduction)